


Lost

by wishwellingtons



Category: Endeavour, Lewis - Fandom, Morse - Fandom
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crime, Crossover, F/M, Flashbacks, M/M, Oxford, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 05:40:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/782440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After his leaving do, the newly-retired Inspector Lewis has to face losing James Hathaway the very same way he lost Val. Meanwhile, James is off on an awfully big adventure which he doesn't understand in the slightest. Top of his irritations is an overly-clever, softly-spoken Detective Constable who's as difficult as Hathaway is awkward, and who didn't even bother to finish his degree. While the 1960s has its charms (Fred Thursday, no smoking ban), Hathaway would quite like to get back to 2012. Unless, of course, he's dead there. </p><p>Meanwhile, all good policemen need a mystery to solve. Even retired ones. </p><p>(will include several pairings along the way)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Turl Street

It occurred to Hathaway, as he lay with his vision gradually diminishing, and his mouth full of blood and the Turl Street pavement, that it was inconsiderate to the point of rudeness to die in the same way as Lewis’s wife, and at Lewis’s own retirement do. Which had also been his leaving do. Appropriate. They – the jumbled voices above his head, only voices now – were having an argument about whether to move him, and there was pain, and light – lead, kindly light, Hathaway thought, and was delighted to find that in the moments immediately before expiration there could also be levity. He could hear a car door slamming, and a high-pitched keening, terrible – and then, possibly, a sound like a car door slamming, or something slamming into a car. 

And then a voice worth fighting for, circling round and round Hathaway’s head, so he had to reach out at random to try and stop the sound, stop it and keep it, except he couldn’t move his arm; what was moving was not of his volition, ah, yes, a board for spines, spinal – tell Inspector Lewis – he’d been in a bad mood but not enough to deliberately imprint himself on the bonnet or bones of whatever fucking Bentley, not after Mrs… oh, fuck, it didn’t really matter, he’d written a will and at least as warm, practiced hands eased an oxygen mask over his mouth, he was glad that at least he wouldn’t die with the taste of Turl Street in his mouth. A stinging brightness in his head got louder, and he tried once more to grip at nothing before gladly giving up into white.

 

\---

It occurred to Hathaway as he woke up with his mouth full of itchy wool blanket and five hundred devils hammering nails through the side of his face, that he was impossibly hungover. No man – if, indeed, he was still a man, he felt so anatomised by pain that he couldn’t be sure – should have a hangover like this. The quantities of alcohol necessary to precipitate such a hangover should preclude waking up at all. Even _thinking_ precipitate had made everything ten times worse. 

He supposed, eyes still firmly shut (although not too firmly. Firmness would have meant ligaments and tendons, all of which were lying shrivelled in the inflamed corners of Hathaway’s skull, whinging, wearing sunglasses and demanding a strike), that he must have been pretty drunk to get himself run over.

Even in the burned-out Fiat Mondeo of Hathaway’s brain, it occurred to him that there was something amiss. It was hard to distinguish one particular wrongness from the mass of appalling complaint lodged behind his eyes and queued up down his throat, his chest and into his unmentionable stomach, but the copper's braincells not killed off by what he assumed had been a truly appalling night of revelry were flickering into life.

He had been run over, he was sure. Yet here he was, lying – by the feel of it – at home in his own bed.

Hathaway forced one red eye open (in his head, there was silent screaming) and realised his mistake.

He wasn’t at home, but nor was he in the hospital. He was lying on a single bed tucked against a mud-green wall, and the blankets weren’t his blankets at all; were of a kind he hadn’t seen since boarding school. He moved his hand to peel wool and spit away from his face and ascertained that, rat-arsed though he was, that was the extent of it. No blood or teeth or Turl Street. 

No spinal board or collar round his neck. 

Second mistake. Not a hospital collar.

He was wearing pyjamas. Not a hard collar, but soft cotton lapels. They were striped; they belonged to a shirt that was alternately pale red and pale blue, and he’d never seen them before in his life. Nor the reading-lamp on the junkshop bedside cabinet, the strip of frenetically-striped rug across the pale, clean lino, the unvarnished wardrobe on the opposite wall, or the dark, heavy disk that was the most familiar thing in the room only because he’d had one like it in at least half his student digs. There were two framed pictures on the wall; a truly hideous daub of a hunting scene, with dead things everywhere, and a sketch of a pretty girl that might have been art school work. There was crockery on the desk, amidst paperwork. A bible. A reasonable number of books.

The books got Hathaway out of bed. His impulse had been to bolt, but his legs were made of spaghetti and he had a seasick stomach so the bolt became a lurch, while his head caught up on things and registered protest via fresh waves of headache. It occurred to Hathaway that his inventory hadn’t included a bin, so being sick would be ill-advised. He hung onto the desk, gasping, then inched his way along to the bookcase.

As he’d thought; some of those books really were his, familiar, delightful friends in this dingy cell of a room. Only a handful of his first editions – had they been stolen with him? Had he been holding them when he was run over, and did that mean he was now in a colleague’s spare room? He wondered, briefly, what had stopped Lewis looking after him – Laura, possibly – but the smart faded with the reassuring joy of turning his own books over in his hands.

Mistake the third. These weren’t really his books. They were the same titles and editions – one even had the same forties bookplate on the flyleaf – but they were in far better condition. Cleaner. Even, Hathaway thought to himself and then immediately wished he hadn’t, newer. 

Hathaway gave a very uneasy look round the single room again. The geometric pattern on the rug. The spindly legs to the desk chair, with its folding, angular and uncomfortable shape. The lino. The shape of the vase that was one of the few decorations. The absence, on a quick bleary survey, of his phone, keys, or laptop – even of a landline, and the fact he couldn’t hear any traffic beyond the net curtains. The fact that the newspaper he could see on the floor by the desk didn’t seem to have any coloured ink or any screeching headlines about asylum seekers.

Perhaps he had been abducted by a sex maniac bibliophile, with a fetish for the early Sixties. 

He decided to save the most alarming confirmation for the newspaper. Foreboding, he told himself, wasn’t even the word. Settling himself more securely on the lino – comfort, given the state of him, could only ever be a relative term – he returned to the book which contained the bookplate on the flyleaf. It wasn’t an unusual bookplate – he remembered the dealer saying how common it was, part of packs you could buy very readily for use in schools and colleges between the World Wars – the ordinary sort, for prizes awarded for merit. But this one was inscribed with a name Hathaway’d liked and always remembered. He shut his eyes, drew a deep breath, and opened the book.

When he opened his eyes, the inscription was there. In blue ink, not the faint copper-brown Hathaway remembered. But it was the same name, all right: Frederick John Thursday. 

This little reunion felt almost like grief. It occurred to Hathaway that he would definitely be sick, right away, unless he could get some fresh air. Dropping the book, he threw himself back towards the window, barking one shin on the desk and the other, a second later, on the uncharitable iron bedstead, and then hearing an ominous snag on the net curtains as he threw up the sash and shoved his head, gasping, into the surprisingly sunny morning air. For a second, the sudden brightness and movement made him heave. Then he forced himself to rally and realised, with mingled shock and relief, that he was looking down at Broad Street – was staring, in fact, across the street to Trinity, and presumably only a dozen doors to the left of Turl Street where, only last night, he’d come a cropper from a Bentley on the kerb. Thank God, he was still in Oxford. Whichever nutcase re-enactor had nabbed him hadn’t taken him far. He lifted his face – which, encrusted with spit and producing intermittent moans, was starting to attract attention – and bathed himself in sun, with a bit of a sob. 

After a second of this reverie, he remembered, and glanced down again at the people giving him curious glances.

The décor, the furniture, his pyjamas and the newspaper had all conspired to give Hathaway an idea which he’d officially dismissed as completely, utterly mad. 

Everything about the people currently staring up at him confirmed the very worst parts of that idea.

Slowly, carefully, trying to make himself believe that those nude-lipped women and those angular moddish men with stupid hair and permanent cigarettes were just attendees at a Beatles-and-Myra-Hindley-convention, Hathaway retracted his head and shoulders back through the sash window. This was not anybody’s idea of a leaving joke. This was – surely, it had to be, someone was filming a period drama in Oxford and he’d just had the misfortune to fall asleep on the set and wake up to a crowdful of extras? That was plausible. Oxford was timeless! The absence of hipsters, tour guides, kebab vans and several hundred French teenagers just represented the film crew’s commitment to their work! And probably yellow lines and disabled bays could be very easily erased from the streets. When he’d worked out why he’d wound up in this cinematic nightmare, it would probably be a very funny story. As he shut the window and sat back down on the bed, Hathaway could almost convince himself he’d seen the road closure and film permit paperwork during the final clearout of his and Lewis’s desks. He worked hard on that sense of conviction while padding back to the desk to look at the newspaper.

Picking it up, he read the date and title very carefully. He didn’t swear, or scream, which was not because his mouth had gone dry, but because there was nothing in a 1965 copy of The Times that didn’t corroborate its status as a prop in the largest, 1960s-set motion picture that central Oxford had ever known. Hathaway knew this. If there were stars behind his eyes and a cold, unsteady numbness spreading slowly up from his rapidly vanishing feet, he could cope. 

What he couldn’t cope with was what he found under the newspaper, exposed to his scrutiny, lying open on top of the desk. It was a badge – a proper, old-fashioned policeman’s badge, made out not for Thames Valley but for the late, lamented City Police. It carried an issue date and a d.o.b., either one of which would have been too old even for Lewis, a rank, name and number. 

The number was one Hathaway had seen every day of his working life. And the name was Detective Constable Hathaway, Oxford City Police.


	2. Iffley Road

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Strange and Morse visit a grave; Innocent takes over at the hospital; Lewis reviews bad memories, and Hathaway tries to get his bearings.

“And it’s not even my birthday!” Jokes were often misplaced, or downright wasted on Morse, but the look of day-old venom he shot Lewis indicated aparticularly poor effort. Morse shoved the flowers onto his desk, slumped into his chair and regarded every object in the office with indescribable malaise.

“Strange is in a meeting.”

“…are the flowers for him, then?” This might have been suicide had Morse not switched from bad temper to contemptuous exhaustion (the results of a heavy lunch, most of it liquid), but there was something comic about the hangdog face above the lilies. 

“No, Lewis, they are not. Why are you here, anyway, shouldn’t you be writing up the Vestris case?” 

“I was, sir, but. Sudden death down at Brookmyre House. It’s those flats off the Iffley Road,” he added, when his inspector just stared at him blankly.

“I know where they are, Lewis,” Morse snapped, with a vehemence that startled Lewis, and, indeed, Strange, who by god’s grace or singular bad timing was unlucky enough to come through the door at that moment. 

“The call just came through – “

“No. Absolutely not. Give it to – Carter, or Jakes, transfer it out. Give it to anyone. Sudden death at Brookmyre House,” Morse snarled at Strange, as if he’d either forgotten the other man was his boss, or suspected he was personally responsible. “Front desk thought they’d give it to me.”

“ – maybe not today, matey,” Strange conceded, giving the sergeant a slightly reproachful look. Lewis stared, baffled. He shut his mouth a second later, but not early enough for Morse.

“A sudden death at that bloody place is not my department, Lewis. Go and do it yourself, but I don’t want to hear about it again. Is this Jakes’ doing, sending it here?” 

“God almighty, Morse, do you really think - ?”

“Sir, I hate to interrupt – “

“All right, Lewis, all right, give it to – just see whoever else is hanging about. Morse. Calm down.” He looked at the flowers. Morse glowered at his fat face for a few more seconds, then sighed.

“Is your meeting over?” The words were full of bite. Strange cast his eyes heavenward as if requesting the gift of forebearance. Morse grunted his approval and picked up the flowers. 

“Back in an hour, Lewis.” He stumped past his young sergeant and let the door slam behind him. As Strange, now sighing audibly, followed, he clapped a hand on Lewis’s shoulder. 

“See if Inspector Carter can take care of it, Lewis. And – “ he jerked his head in the direction of Morse’s warpath, “ – don’t mention it to him when he gets back. Not today, not ever.”

“Old stuff, sir? Personal?” At this, Strange’s various facial contortions were evidently designed to minimise the importance both of the conversation and whatever had sent Morse into spontaneous combustion at the word ‘Brookmyre’, but when he told Lewis to forget the entire thing and not go digging, it was an order.   
\---

“Still seems funny, seeing that name. Knowing what we know.” Strange made the quip every year. Morse glanced down at the headstone – the flowers looked stupid, lying on their side. He should have chosen ones that fitted in the rose, but he’d spent a lot of money to get hand-tied, and it was too late now. 

 

“I still wonder what the name meant.”

“Not everything’s a crossword clue, matey.”

Morse gnawed bad-temperedly on a hangnail. Self-pity was settling on him, along with a headache.

“And tear our pleasures with rough strife  
Through the iron gates of life.”

“What?” Strange blinked at the headstone as though the words were engraved there and he’d somehow failed to spot them. Morse exhaled.

“Marvell.”

“I knew that.” When Morse managed the energy to raise an eyebrow, Strange shrugged. “Jess has him for O Level.”

“You make him sound like a supply teacher.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t fit. Not our Jim,” Strange declared, with a comfortably proprietorial air – which, Morse decided, was only possible if you’d never spent two hours in the Radcliffe Infirmary, drenched in Jim’s blood and smeling of his offal. “He wasn’t the live fast, die young type.”

“Except he did.”

“Morse.”

“My fault.”   
It was an old quarrel, and each year they had less and less energy for it. Strange gazed right around the churchyard, and welcomed rescue. “Talking of iron gates, they’re arriving for another funeral. Come on, old son, I’ll stand you a pint at the Cricketer’s. Poor little sod,” he added, under his breath, and although Morse wasn’t meant to catch it, he did, and wondered if it were for Hathaway or himself.

\----

“Poor sod,” Innocent said softly. She and Laura had left Lewis by James’s bedside, Laura because she desperately needed a cigarette and Innocent because suddenly coordinating a (possible) bereavement and a (definite) hit-and-run enquiry meant she desperately needed to sober up. And, although her last cigarette had been twelve years ago, she really wanted to stand on a fire escape and breathe deeply of the carcinogenic air from Laura’s face. 

Laura was wishing fates on James’s attacker which, in their imaginative detail, required her full professional knowledge of human anatomy. Then, she’d suck again on her cigarette, gaze back towards the ward in which they’d left Lewis, at James’s bedside, and try not even to look like she was crying. 

Innocent was wishing to God she hadn’t let her hair down to the tune of four gins-and-tonic before James went barrelling into the road. Like Laura, she’d also have welcomed the chance to eradicate Lewis’s expression from her tired mind. 

He was sitting in James’s cubicle, covered (so it seemed) in the sum total of blood that James had lost between Turl Street and his first surgery. James was now in an induced coma and likely to remain so until (unless) the doctors could stabilise him.   
Although when told this, Lewis claimed he understood, he was sitting by James’s head as if expecting him to wake at any moment. He looked, Innocent had reflected, like a little old man. 

And Laura, shivering and smoking on the fire escape, was becoming as distressed as Lewis was catatonic.

Innocent, as she did whether surrounded by valued colleagues, or familial idiots, gave an inward sigh and took charge. “Get some rest, Laura. Take Robbie home with you, and – I’ll stay here.” She waved away protest; not only was she, as ever, basically everyone’s boss, but Laura hadn’t adequately disguised her relief (nobody ever did, when Innocent offered to make their lives easier). “He’s in a bad way, and – he’ll need you. James won’t – there’s no reason,” she insisted, even though it made _her_ want to cry, and if _she_ did, then all of them were sunk, “to suppose that anything will change tonight.”

“ – thanks, Jean.”

Innocent smiled. “Not a problem. I’ll fetch you a car.” Ten minutes later, she was alone in the ICU room, scrubbing her hands with sanitizer and toeing her shoes off under the chair. 

 

In later life, because he did have to have one, Lewis would look back on this evening and reflect on the blanks that suppressed his memory of parts of it. He didn’t remember Laura persuading him to get to his feet and be taken home, even though there’d been quite an altercation. He didn’t remember seeing Innocent at the entrance to ICU, even though she’d been the one to stay with James, which – he was sure – must have seemed like the most important thing in the world, just then. He didn’t remember relinquishing James’s coat, what was still distinguishable of it, or getting into the police car Innocent had organised for them. He had a brief flash of lucidity when PC Qureshi put the interior light on, revealing his stained clothes. He remembered, too, the sky beginning to bleach over Magdalen Bridge, as the car headed East to Laura’s house, a quiet terrace towards Iffley Fields. 

One picture always persisted. To his dying day, Robbie Lewis would only have to shut his eyes to see the second the paramedics turned James Hathaway into position on the spinal board, and Hathaway turned rigid with the blood that came rushing out of his mouth. He also retained a stop-motion sequence of leaving the pub – not even time to call Hathaway, to berate him for loping off early – and of the car, a ludicrous abomination, that swerved, climbed the pavement sharply, and smeared Hathaway along a college wall. 

He hadn’t seen the driver’s face. He’d seen Hathaway’s face. The last time Lewis had seen Val alive, she’d been smiling and happy, conspiring with a friend about where to get the best bargains, and how they’d break their shopping hunt for lunch in Covent Garden. He’d hung on until the train went, unusually for him. The next time he’d seen her, she’d been peaceful and cold in a London chapel of rest. He’d never fully imagined the interim, but now he’d lived it. With James.

‘The lad – he’s just a boy, Laura,’ Lewis said, shifting uneasily. He’d been saying that to her for eight years. And now he’d probably die. He let Laura get him under the shower and semi-supervise the washing off of blood, wondering grimly where this ranked, for her, on the spectrum between girlfriend and doctor. Carer to a redundant old man who’d basically let his sergeant die.   
\---

Since looking at the police pass, Hathaway had made several smaller, subsidiary discoveries. His lodgings included the use of a bathroom, which was fortunate since on discovering himself to have apparently retreated five decades, he’d become aware of a certain instability about his bowels. 

The bathroom contained the customary mirror, which was how he’d found about his hair. 

Since then, two hours had passed, during which time Hathaway had come to no definite conclusions about how to proceed, but had smoked eight cigarettes (there was a packet in the desk, and some matches), rifled the pockets of what was presumably his overcoat, wondered vaguely whether he was going to die of TB or just infect the antiquated planet with some futuristic, untreatable strain, and attempted to check his mobile forty-eight times. 

He’d had a bit of a meltdown about never seeing Lewis again, but since the meltdown had coincided with the very worst of the bathroom sequence, prolonged reflection on that had been impossible. 

Eventually, it had occurred to him to pray, but the only words he could manage were distinctly accusatory – although the Bible’s tendency to categorical statements had caused James much strife over the years, its total silence on time-travel now seemed unhelpful. 

Also, James wasn’t entirely sure whether he wanted to be sent back. As he recalled , his last moments of twenty-first century living had been precisely that; the mirror in his new bathroom revealed a stonking black eye and a neat square of gauze on his forehead, but he definitely wasn’t dead. At best, Hathaway supposed he could be called unborn.

He considered going out. He considered whether he was on some sort of inter-galactic mission, destined to right wrongs and/or create a butterfly effect. He had a far more entertaining time working out which of his musical heroes were now, as it happened, not dead, and could he go and see them. Then he remembered again about Lewis and death and got the dry heaves. He wondered if that porn cinema up in Jericho (scurrilous rumours about Morse) had ever been more than a myth. 

The door went. 

This proved a dilemma. Hathaway had yet to determine a strategy for dealing with people. Presumably, given his pass, there had been a James Hathaway accustomed to the sixties and sufficiently competent in his activities to be a policeman with colleagues (although why the fuck was he only a constable? He ought to be a fucking sergeant, at least). They would think he’d gone mad. They’d probably think the real world, of mobiles and doner kebabs and (shit) decriminalized homosexuality was a fever-dream attendant on (Hathaway touched it gingerly) the bruise and black eye. Hathaway hoped to god it wasn’t. How was he meant to be know who his friends were? Did he even have friends? He’d never been good at reading human behaviour. He bowed to women, and his only real friend was his crumpled, semi-elderly Inspector who had a middle-aged girlfriend in one universe and was probably a bloody schoolboy in this one.

The knocking returned, less impressed than ever. 

Hathaway opened the door, to a man who – even in his civvies – was unmistakably a policeman. At the state of Hathaway’s face, he removed a cigarette from his mouth and whistled. “Bloody hell. I wouldn’t have bothered.”

A bastard, Hathaway decided, disliking him at once. It was hard not to dislike someone who knew more about you than you did yourself.


End file.
